Israel — An Unlikely Pariah in a Dangerous World

By Janet Levy, AM THINKER April 23/24

If you believe the enemies of the free world, Israel is guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.  Governments, international organizations, NGOs, academics, and student activists condemn its post-October 7th actions against Islamic terrorists.  Leftist media makes the only democracy in the Middle East seem worse than communist China.

Consider only a few of China’s numerous atrocities that Western governments, international bodies, and mainstream media overlook:

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues its brutal suppression of students at Tibet’s universities.  Every year, beginning in March, Tibetan students organize protests to mark the anniversary of the Chinese occupation of their country in 1959.  To counter them, since 2009, China has been ordering campus lockdowns lasting as long as a month.  Surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, and tracking via a required app called Clean Cafeteria alert the authorities to students’ locations and activities.  This year’s lockdown lasted the entire semester.  At a recent protest, over 100 students were arrested and 20 killed.
• In February, over 1,000 Tibetans were arrested and beaten for peacefully protesting a dam project.  The dam will force the relocation of two villages and destroy several centuries-old Buddhist monasteries, some with murals dating to the 13th century.  China’s policies in Tibet — during its 65-year occupation — amount to nothing short of ethnic cleansing and the eradication of Tibetan culture and religion.
• Chinese nationals at U.S. universities are subject to repression and surveillance by the communist state and its agencies.  If they speak about human rights violations in China, they are targeted for attacks, and their families in the homeland are threatened.  University administrations and teachers, quick to protest every perceived wrong in America and the world, do nothing for the persecuted students.  After all, they receive over $1 billion in CCP largesse and tuition from nearly 400,000 Chinese students.
• The persecution of Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong adherents is well known only because of the independent efforts of exile groups and individuals in China who send out reports and videos at significant risk.  But mainstream media and governments turn a blind eye to their protests.  Even the International Criminal Court (ICC) has failed these persecuted groups.  In 2020, Uighur exiles urged the court to investigate the CCP’s campaign of torture, forced sterilization, organ harvesting, and other abuses.  The court refused, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to show Chinese officials committed crimes over which it had jurisdiction.
• Hong Kong-based pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai, 76, has so far spent four years in solitary confinement at a maximum-security prison.  He faces the prospect of life imprisonment for sedition.  Lai had fled mainland China at 12 as a stowaway on a boat to seek freedom in the British colony.  He became a billionaire after starting a series of businesses and later set up media houses.  His assets have been frozen, and his newspaper, Apple Daily, has been shut down.  Western governments’ responses to his son Sebastien’s appeals for their intervention are disappointing.

Despite its long history of violation of sovereignty, occupation, transnational repression, and flagrant human rights abuse, China has not been the target of investigations by the U.N. or the ICC, nor of protests by students, academicians, and activist groups.  The U.S. and U.K. governments and the European Union pretend the communist regime in China is benign.  Even the overwhelming circumstantial and scientific evidence that convinced leading scientists of China deliberately creating the COVID-19 virus was not enough.  The WHO team that visited the Wuhan virology lab cleared China of foul play.

Contrast that with the reaction to Israel’s righteous defense of its territory and its citizens after the savage jihadi attack on October 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 civilians were killed and 240 hostages were taken.

The slaughter and hostage-taking were led by Hamas, with support from Iran and Qatar.  Three in four Palestinian Arabs lauded the attack.  The very next day, Iranian proxy Hezbollah began firing toward Israel, displacing tens of thousands of people in the north.  In November, Houthi rebels began launching drone and missile attacks in the Red Sea to pressure Israel to end its defensive war against Hamas.  On April 14th, after Israelis took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) troops hiding in an Iranian consulate in Damascus, Iran launched more than 300 drones and cruise and ballistic missiles toward Israel.  However, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) managed to thwart them.

The IDF retaliation has been calibrated and pinpointed to minimize collateral damage.  Richard Kemp, a British colonel with 30 years’ experience commanding an infantry battalion, refers to the IDF as the most moral army in the world, doing “more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.” The IDF works against tremendous odds, for Hamas routinely uses citizens as shields, hospitals, and residential areas as strongholds and arms depots, and reports the death of its fighters as civilian casualties.

But from day one, Israel has only been vilified.  The roster of calumnies heaped upon it runs long.  Even when it is crystal clear that slogans of “from the river to the sea” refer to a yearning for its annihilation.  Here is what it faces as it defends itself.

• To begin with, there has been no sympathy for the families of the victims of October 7th or the hostages, many of whom were tortured, raped, or subject to the vilest abuses.  About 140 hostages are still unaccounted for.  It is as if their lives and rights do not matter to the world.
• Israel has been condemned in 45 UNHRC resolutions and censured by the ICC and E.U.  It has been boycotted worldwide and threatened with sanctions and the withholding of military equipment.
• Except briefly, America has been critical of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and called for restraint, even accusing the Jewish state of precipitating a “humanitarian crisis.”  In February, President Biden rebuked Israel, calling its action in Gaza “over the top.”  Democrats continue to call for ending military aid to Israel.  They demand a “permanent ceasefire” when they know that Israel’s enemies want to annihilate it.
• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for new elections to oust Israel’s democratically elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The recent left-led and financed protests in Israel, too, bear the signature of American instigation.
• E.U. leaders continue to call for a “humanitarian pause” as Israel routs Hamas.  Even Germany, which considers itself a “strong ally” of Israel, joins in this call.  The West disingenuously attacks Israel for providing insufficient humanitarian aid into the region when there is abundant aid flowing in, with no blocks imposed by Israel.
• The WHO chief blamed Israel for turning Gaza’s Shifa Hospital into a battlefield when it is Hamas that turned it into a stronghold.  None of the international medical and aid organizations have protested mosques, hospitals, and even maternity wards being turned into battlefields by Hamas.
• On campuses and in sundry protest demonstrations in the U.S. and the West, students, activists, academicians, and left-leaning NGOs paint Israel as genocidal.  This hateful rhetoric is not only tolerated; it’s reported glowingly by the media.  This has resulted in a worldwide wave of antisemitism, including violent attacks not seen since the Holocaust.

Unlike China, the most dangerous and autocratic power in the world today, Israel is on the frontlines of the fight for Western civilization.  Her enemies are the enemies of the free world.